In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat

Set A Contemporary Vintage Table

Published on March 5, 2012October 4, 2012 by In The Vintage KitchenLeave a comment

For years now, Ms.Jeannie has been collecting bits and pieces of antique china to use alongside her everyday dishes. These everyday dishes are as basic as basic can be: white, plain, unadorned. The only bit of flair they possess is that they were made by an Italian plateware company. This makes the plates oval shaped instead of round and the coffee cup saucers are offset to accomodate a slice of biscotti alongside your coffee cup. Other than that they are strictly ordinary.

Having said that Ms. Jeannie discovered one day, while cleaning out her china cabinet, that when she paired these ordinary day plates with her vintage china treasures, her whole table setting instantly hummed with it’s own sort of individuality and surprise. The ordinary looked extraordinary and the mis-matched patterns looked marvelous next to each other because they contained a lot of similar colors.

So Ms. Jeannie started experimenting and was delighted to discover a very broad range of different decorating options when it came to pairing vintage with contemporary.

This is an example of how you can set a contemporary vintage table by combining contemporary dishes with vintage china.

If you look closely there are 10 different plate patterns/designs in this setting. They all work together because they have two themes tying them together: birds and green leaves.

The unexpected vermillion color in the napkin also helps tie together all the warm colors without looking forced or too matchy matchy.

The square bird dish is actually a contempoary soap dish, but has been repurposed to act as a small bread plate or a drink coaster here. It also matches the colors of the black and white toile-looking hunt plate as well as the antique orange, black and green floral bread plate from the 1930’s.

The colors in the antique sugar bowl match the colors found on the vintage bird water glasses. The crazing on the sugar bowl also matches the faux antique patina on the contemporary white salad plate from the Todd English Collection.

You can see here just by adding or subtracting pieces you can get different effects from your table display:

Ms. Jeannie is drawn to three things when it comes to scouting vintage china. She loves anything made out of old English ironstone, anything that contains the color green in its design and anything that contains crackling or crazing marks. So her collection has thousands of ways that it could displayed together since they have those three characteristics in common. You can start your own vintage china collection based on color, shape, time period or region for your own unique look.

This table arrangement was made up of the following pieces:

1 antique sugar bowl (circa early 1900’s)

1 Contemporary ceramic soap dish from Creative Co-op

2 contemporary salad plates from the Todd English collection

1 contemporary fox hunt salad plate from Corona

1 antique bread plate from T.S.&T Paramount Ivory circa 1930’s

2 vintage bird beverage glasses circa 1950s

2 vintage coffee cups (swirl pattern) from Hitkari Potteries

1 contemporary coffee mug from the Todd English Collection

1 vermillion colored cloth napkin from Pottery Barn

Start your vintage tableware collection with this curious antique sugar bowl for $14.00

Curious Antique Sugar Bowl - Pink & Yellow Rose Pattern from msjeannieology — Curious Antique Sugar Bowl – Pink & Yellow Rose Pattern from msjeannieology

Countdown to Mad Men and the Persona of the 1960’s Woman

Published on March 1, 2012October 4, 2012 by In The Vintage KitchenLeave a comment

The countdown has begun! Season 5 of Mad Men is almost here and for a vintage lover like Ms. Jeannie it couldn’t get here faster.

Thrilled to see the new poster in her email box, Ms. Jeannie was a little taken aghast at the naked mannequin – but after all it is fitting for both the time period and Don Draper’s state of affairs (no pun intended!).

Ms. Jeannie’s friend, Thom, was visiting from L.A. where he said the city is braced for Mad Men fever. Buildings are dressed in giant size billboards throughout the city in this image:

Which we both agreed was fantastic advertising because, no where does it say Mad Men anywhere on the sign but fans would recognize the iconic silhouette and the simple font anywhere. Simplicity and subsequent notoriety like this is a marketing team’s dream!

Read an interesting interview here with Chris Brown, the creative director behind Mad Men for a majority of the episodes. http://enews.tufts.edu/stories/1628/2010/03/01/MadMen

A favorite ad campaign clip from the show is when Don Draper pitches the Kodak Carousel.

If you get nostolgic yourself for a vintage Kodak Carousel you can purchase one on Etsy. This one below even comes with an instruction manual!

Ms. Jeannie will be posting several 1950’s-1960’s era Life magazines in her shop soon. They are full of great retro ads that I’m sure Don Draper would have loved to concept.

If Ms. Jeannie could step back in time during this period she would choose Peggy’s role, played by Elizabeth Moss, since Peggy is determined to be on the same playing field as the ad guys and won’t let things like female discrimination, office politics and pre-conceived notions get in her way. She’s a woman with ambition, that Peggy Olson is, yet she’s not willing to sacrifice her humanity in order to reach that golden ring. She’s flawed like all the others but she’s also the character who is most aware of her own short sightedness. She strives to be good, and in that simple act of trying, she sort of is good.

That said, Ms. Jeannie wouldn’t mind having the wardrobe and (hair color!) of Joan:

Michelle Williams recently did an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross about her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in the movie My Week with Marilyn. She had some really interesting things to say about studying for the role of Marilyn, what it was like to be a woman in the 1950’s & 60’s and what it must have been like to be Marilyn specifically in that time period.

If you missed it. Here is the podcast

Michelle Williams Interview – Fresh Air

michelle-williams-marilyn-monroe-vogue — Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe

Etsy has an extensive listing for retro etiquette books, but this one stood out among all the others. It’s fascinating to see how women’s roles have changed over the course of just a few decades. Reading books like this sort of hits you like a ton of bricks:

Life for a dreamer like Ms. Jeannie would have been tough. But thanks to the mindset of gals like Peggy, Ms. Jeannie would have made it through and probably done something remarkable in the process.

Featured Shop Item: Rachel Cade – A Glimpse into Vintage Africa

Published on February 27, 2012October 4, 2012 by In The Vintage Kitchen3 Comments

Rachel Cade was a popular fiction book written by Charles Mercer in 1956 about a woman who travels to Africa as a medical missionary. Set in the Belgian Congo in the late 1930’s Rachel finds love and adventure in a foreign land plagued by death and disease. Circumstances lead her to make a life-altering decision regarding the affections of two men that ultimately ties her to Africa forever. I won’t spoil the ending if you want to read it:)

Selling over 3 million copies in the mid-1950’s it was translated in 14 languages and in 1961 it was made into a movie called The Sins of Rachel Cade starring Angie Dickinson and Roger Moore.

This is a youtube clip from the movie.

Imagining Rachel’s African world in the 1930’s I picked some vintage items from Etsy that she might have encountered in both her personal life and her professional life while living abroad.